Game Developer Conference Preview

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Both PC and console games have become a staple of today’s interactive entertainment landscape. The ups and downs of the game business now make mainstream business news. We see games reviewed in publications as varied as home theater magazines, weekly news rags, and even the local paper. Passive entertainment is passé, and creating your own story to tell has become a vital part of the lives of more and more people. Whether it’s playing a 60th level dwarf cleric in World of Warcraft, taking on squads of elite alien troopers in Halo 2, creating the perfect life for your avatar in The Sims 2 or pushing civilization onto other planets in Galactic Civilizations II, there are games that appeal to almost anyone.

The process of creating games combines programming, hardware engineering, music composition, art design, and writing in a unique way to create titles that let the player become part of the story. The cost of game development has increased rapidly, and A-list titles now regularly command budgets in excess of $10 million. But by the same token, small teams of indie developers work together over the Internet to create compelling titles.

Let’s also not forget the infrastructure. A game like World of Warcraft II or Dungeons and Dragons Online now require massive servers and huge network bandwidth to serve up virtual worlds for thousands of players on any given night.

The annual Game Developer’s Conference, held this year in San Jose California, brings together programmers, artists, musicians, and writers. The tracks range from deep technical issues to the nuts and bolts of the business and on to the societal impact of the new medium. Let’s not forget the show expo, where a variety of hardware and software suppliers will be showing off the latest tools needed to create the next interactive masterpiece.

Jason Cross and I will be there next week, soaking up the sessions, talking to developers, and cruising the Expo show floor. A roundup of what we’ll be covering follows. Continued…

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